Tag Archives: first year instruction

In December I wrote about possible changes to our librarians’ involvement in our college’s first year and transfer liberal arts seminar. As victims of our success, our instruction model has become unsustainable. Teaching and support of this course leaves us with little mental energy for our other teaching and librarian responsibilities, which is problematic when those of us who teach have multiple liaison departments to support, not to mention our own research interests and library projects. We could, of course, teach this seminar and nothing else, but there is so much opportunity for course-integrated instruction and embedded librarianship at the major/minor level of study, that focusing only on the first year/transfer seminar would be a huge disservice to students and the college curriculum.

We’re in a transition period. I’m planning to take a sabbatical in August, the faculty member overseeing the seminar program is changing, and we may have a visiting librarian working with us in the fall. We’ve also been working much more closely with our colleagues in the Writing Center this year, which is something I’ve been wanting to do for years now, as they are, in a word, AWESOME. It’s the perfect opportunity to try something new with our seminar involvement, and that’s exactly what we’ll be doing.

Instead of assigning librarian liaisons to each of the seminars, who then teach a minimum of two classes per seminar, we’re adopting the “train the trainer” approach that our colleagues in the Writing Center were wise enough to push through last year. We’re leading workshops for both faculty and seminar peer mentors (upperclass students who take the class and provide academic and social support to new students). And we’re doing this jointly, with the Writing Center, which I am so glad is finally happening. I think it makes a lot of sense, and will hopefully encourage faculty to better interconnect our college’s four core liberal arts skills–writing, oral expression, information literacy, critical thinking–rather than viewing them as discrete concepts. Our hope is that with these workshops, and a supporting Seminar Toolkit (in a libguide, of course), faculty and peer mentors will have a better understanding of writing and information literacy as a developmentalprocess rather than a checklist. The toolkit will contain learning activities, sample assignments, and lesson plans from the librarians, Writing Center faculty, and faculty who have taught seminar in past years. There is so much overlap between teaching writing and teaching information literacy, and I’m glad that we’re finding ways to approach our faculty peers together.

I’m particularly excited about teaching and working with the seminar peer mentors. They’re bright, engaged students who the first year and transfer students really look up to and respect. They have a lot of social capital that we aren’t using to maximum benefit, and better still, they have a relationship with the seminar students. Peer teaching and learning was a major theme of my ACRL 2017 conference, and I was able to find some well-developed examples of peer learning programs in practice.

Danielle Salomon, Casey Shapiro, Reed Buck, Annie Pho, and Marc Levis-Fitzgerald have an excellent conference paper on the Embedded Peer Specialists program at UCLA, which, in their words, “combines the academic context of academic librarianship with the scalability of peer learning services.”

Rosan Mitola, John Watts, and Erin Rinto presented alongside student Peer Research Coaches Kameron Joyner, Jason Meza, and Katia Uriarte about the peer-assisted learning program at the UNLV Libraries and extensive Peer Research Coach training program.

One thing these presenters and writers all seemed to stress (which is something I’ll need to keep in mind) is that this peer-assisted learning/ train the trainer approach won’t really mean less work. It takes a lot of time, planning, and emotional / mental energy to empower student-teachers (because really, that’s what they are) and ensure their continued development and growth. But all of the librarians involved in these programs seem to agree that the benefits–a more empowered student cohort, wider educational reach, meaningful interaction with smaller groups of students–are substantial. I am feeling very much indebted to these colleagues who presented at ACRL 2017 and hope that I’ll be able to share successes and failures from my own attempts at figuring out a new way to involve the library in our first year and transfer seminar program.

I’ve been an instruction librarian since 2007, and over the years my perspective on library instruction has shifted from

How can I convince my liaison department faculty to schedule a class?toHow can I make my classes more scaffolded within the curriculum?
toHow can I possibly do all of this teaching in one semester and get my other work done too?

The more experienced librarians reading this blog post might cry “BURNOUT!” but I am beginning to think that there’s a larger structural issue with library instruction programs like mine (and perhaps like yours as well).

The Set Up

I work at a small, public, liberal arts college that prides itself on its focus on teaching, undergraduate research, and close academic relationships between faculty and students. Librarians are 12 month tenure-track faculty, and although we don’t typically teach credit-bearing courses, we are heavily involved in the traditional “librarian-as-guest-lecturer” model of library instruction. I use the phrase “library instruction” because as much as I want to say we have an “information literacy education” program we aren’t quite there yet. My colleagues and I work with every section of incoming first year and transfer student liberal arts seminars (required for all new students) as well as multiple classes in multiple liaison departments. We’ve hit a point where our seminar involvement pretty much takes over our entire existence each fall semester, to the detriment of our other teaching, to say nothing of our other professional responsibilities, service, and scholarship. I’ve tried creating banks of activities based on our much-reduced information literacy learning outcomes so that my colleagues could plug-and-teach more easily, but the uniqueness of each seminar section makes it difficult to follow any kind of scripted lesson plan for all sections.

If the world is as wonderful a place as I hope it to be, I will likely be on sabbatical next academic year, leaving my colleagues–or, if we’re lucky, a visiting librarian–to absorb my teaching responsibilities (sorry, friends). As my library’s unofficial instruction coordinator, I realize that even with an extra teaching librarian we’d still be stretched far too thin to actually make a dent in the amount of work we put into these seminars. So…

What’s a Library Instruction Coordinator to Do?

I was professionally “raised” on the library instruction model that praised getting into as many research-based classes as you possibly can, because doing so would help students become better researchers and faculty better understand the importance of information literacy. I don’t buy this at all anymore. I feel like it puts librarians in an odd (perhaps even subservient) role and just isn’t pedagogically sound. What’s the point of teaching ALL THE THINGS ALL THE TIME? That just leads to repetition and, well, burnout.

That said, curriculum mapping is hard. Unless information literacy is built into the college’s curriculum from the top down (see Champlain College’s Core Curriculum sequence for scaffolding IL dreams), Major and Core Curricula are often unwieldy and not necessarily conducive to sequential information literacy integration. Plus doing so is not a guarantee that teaching loads for librarians will be manageable and sustainable.

I know some libraries have pulled out of face-to-face instruction for first year courses like seminars and English Composition altogether, in favor of web-based tutorials or LMS embedded modules. Others hire one person to do all instruction for that particular course, and still others, like mine, split up the course load among all teaching librarians.

One way that our first year and transfer seminar is unique is that each section has a dedicated Peer Mentor–an upperclass student who takes the course and serves in this oddly defined role of part teaching assistant, part model student, part emotional support person. A visit to Swarthmore College last month, which has a wonderful peer research and information associates program, has me thinking about ways in which the Peer Mentors could take on many of the more mechanical teaching tasks that we as librarians are doing now. This would include things like introducing students to the discovery layer, databases, catalog, and interlibrary loan. We could then, as a library faculty, develop assignments, activities, and lesson plans to share with seminar instructors to integrate information literacy into their pedagogy.

I wonder if that’s going against one of librarianship’s sacred cows. Non-librarians teaching information literacy???? Gasp! Cringe! Ack! But I think it would free my colleagues and I up to work more thoughtfully with our liaison departments both in and outside of the classroom and develop a pedagogy of information literacy that best meets their needs.

My goal for the spring is to investigate pedagogy / library instruction models at other small colleges for ideas and inspiration, and create a plan for fall 2017. I’m curious to hear from readers who are perhaps in similar instruction predicaments. What’s worked for you?